


sterling silver (we say goodbye, i guess)

by pseudosynth



Category: No Fandom
Genre: i just wanted to put this somewhere, prose poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 14:29:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18918898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudosynth/pseuds/pseudosynth
Summary: this is my senior thesis from high school. it’s about trauma, family, and the way i analyze myself.some music that drove this: the midnight’s “kids”, gorillaz’ “the now now”, kitty’s “rose gold”, u2’s “achtung baby”





	sterling silver (we say goodbye, i guess)

**Lucid**

**I.**

Each night, I hurtle into oblivion at ninety-five miles per hour. It's not always a telephone pole. Once it was a levee. Another time, it was a brick building. One specific time, it was a person. With glassy eyes, she traced the motion of my car as it flamed towards her. I felt static when the bonnet crushed a line of cleavage through her midsection. The blood and the loss of it made me dizzy. The smile stuck on her face made me dizzier. Sheet metal folded into mirror dimensions until she was an origami molecule on a sea of Volkswagen Tornado Red. 

I was scared, horrified, bile rose in my throat quicker than the collision. That was the first time. It was horror, made me feel sick, sad, upset, and it bloomed into memory. I started studying my car for bloodstains every morning, unfolding, smoothing my hands down flaps of scraps, flinching when my nails screeched across at angles. She was nowhere. No little mumps under the pads of my fingers to indicate the presence of a tininess, a dissection. 

I told myself  _ it's okay _ , and I left for work. But still I looked for her everywhere. She wasn't in the eyes of the old woman who ordered egg salad. She wasn't in my blood when I pulled a hangnail. She wasn't standing by my car in the parking lot, just visible through the window, dancing to my favorite tune. I want to ask her how she did it. Maybe a why. Maybe what  _ it  _ is. Maybe even why she birthed the scrapclapping and a maroonpooling into my head and tacked it there. I just have to see the indent of my grille on her skin, hairs pulled clean from follicle around the bellybutton, and then run, sick from the violence, sick from thoughts, needing only the validation. I need a way to know, because the proof of vein, artery, capillary, heart is invisible on the Tornado Red.

 

**II.**

I often float through days. Lazy rivers of air and talk, and jungles of swivel chairs and concrete. It isn't easy to float when your body wants to fight. When the jungle pushes at you in your peripheral, palmleaves of words of memories reaching out to brush your bare arms. They like to reach between my bracelets to touch the the thin skin on the bottom of my wrist, testing my fragility.  _ May I burrow here?  _ My decline matters not. It's usually that way. It is, however, much easier to float when you're exhausted; when you're tired, four hours of sleep, sometimes three, five on a good night. I can't fall asleep at school, I just dream of it, wish I could, doze off in intervals of seconds. Maybe it's because my dreams can't thrive here. I'm glad. 

But she mocks me here. She mocks me with new corporeality, proving to me my madness, her existence. I don't see her straight-on, just in the corners of my vision, tangling her limbs together and cocking her head at me. I never move to look, because it wouldn't fulfill me so much as frighten me. She does thrive here. In the jungle, pouring pools of raindrops off of leaves into her mouth, onto her tongue. Her eyes lay open doing so, and they do still as she crumples the leaf between her yellow teeth, chewing silently. It's a lot to take in. This is where I do not want to find her, but where she finds me. I'm certainly not fond of ghosts, but they've turned out to despise me more, and she is (living? maybe? perhaps?) proof. I can't always surround myself in sound, in friends, in talk, so when I'm alone, she is still there, sometimes through the window. There's security in the fact that she's a thick wall away, but there's only ice in her gaze, claws down my spine. Who is she? I see her, but I don't know what she looks like. 

She chatters through the lunchline under my feet, poking my ankles with palmleaves she pulls from the jungle. I am incapable of pushing her away, because I  _ promise,  _ she is not tangible. Only quantifiable as She, Her, gifting the air with static when she's present.

The bellringing stifles her at the end of the day, no other time, as I finally step out of the building, begin the walk to my car in the cold. The crux of her existence. But when I shut the door, I kill her with the sound and the crank of my engine, and she does not return until I am back there. 

 

**III.**

My dreams move to more regular programming now and again. It's pleasant, the absence of chewed metal, of screeching hellsound. I wonder where she lives. It isn't in the tornado red, it's not at work. Does she feed off of my psyche at school? Off of fear, anxiety, dismissal? Loss of sleep? 

I am positive she would love to know that I search for her, for the proof of the collision, of the blooming she created. She's a chattering mess of discombobulated scleras, stringy catgut hair, unrecognizable noises and features. She is nobody I know or knew. I dream of the jungle, painted red, visceral, marred with a path of destruction like a twister had torn through; of my car, bleeding its color onto the earthen floor. It is intact. She is nowhere. 

There's a crunching under my feet, then a squelching, as I near my car, the wreck that isn't there. I peer into my heavily-tinted windows, looking for her. The line of cleavage borne into her, sinew hair, something. Nothing. Bile doesn't rise in my throat this time, but tears well up as I sit back on my haunches on the floor. I feel the texture change underneath me, the world around me molding to my misfortune, to sweeping it away. It pulls away from her like I try to, like everyone else lets it in, lets her in. The jungle recedes, not in her presence, but in mine; in the face of my tears, fears, the vermillion bleeding into pools around me. 

And then, she moves towards me on vacuum feet, crawling out of the trunk of my car. She sprouts more limbs, more appendages, creeping like a spider out of the spreading space. Her vacuum feet hit the ground softly with no noise. 

She talks to me.

“Can I touch you?”

I stutter over my tongue, muddling it in my mouth with my boiling words that won’t rise.

The next thing I find is the sun in my wake, peering through the windows. I rise from my bed on slow feet to look out the window at my car, to see if somehow she is there, laying across the bonnet, sticking out of the sunroof, popping the hood. But it sits alone, icicles hanging from the sides, between slats of the grille. The next challenge is in readying myself for school, for my ultimate attempt to just exist. She's there, faded, slowly dismantling me, twisting around herself in serpentine manner, mouthing along to my favorite songs. How can someone without eyes watch me so closely? How, when she truly isn't real? My friends laugh at her, because she's funny. She's a funny trick, a funny, funny trick to play on God, and on me. They know her now? They’ve seen it? 

Her teeth are so yellow between her thin, bloody lips. I curl into a ball in the biggest bathroom stall to hide, listen to the high whine of the faucet left just barely turned. She barks lowly nearby, and I settle for a ghost.

 

 

 

**WikiHow presents - Moving Past Trauma with an Emotional Support Animal and a Separate Self**

 

⇴

 

**METHOD ONE:** **_Give your love a voice so people can hear it. Scream loud enough, and someone will_ **

**_eventually come over to see what all the fuss is about._ **

 

_ Step One _ : Here, in the clearwater, few things stir.

 

_ Step Two _ : Thoughts hop around on the pads of their feet, whiskers steadied by the weight of the tides. How do their bodies move, then? I don’t know. Keep their collars on and don’t let them outside. They’re all that’s here for you right now.

 

_ Step Three: _ Here. That’s all that moves. I’m telling you this so you know that it will be concrete someday. You may pass through every autumn waiting to choke on the leaves, but eventually, you will dig your fingers into that wet cement, and let it dry like so*. 

  * *If you turned around right now, would you see home?



 

_ Step Four:  _ Keep your head on straight, and maybe someone will care again. Keep that schedule clear. Quit cramming that aquarium head full of hypervigilant saltwater and just  _ move _ !

 

**METHOD TWO:** **_Burning bridges is easy when you’re already on fire, I guess._ **

 

_ Step One:  _ Stuck in the cement, you could candy some words to make it all drive deeper, but they would all still hide*. Salt the words instead, make them taste like pain. Then they’ll grab a bite. Humans love patterns.

  * *Grinning doesn’t do that face justice, sweet cheeks.



 

_ Step Two:  _ Change your phone number* three times. To be sure. She’s everywhere!

  * *(205) 903-6414.



 

_ Step Three:  _ Get kissed straight into stars and then forget it happened. Lead him on. Love the idea of him half to death.

 

_ Step Four (optional) _ _ :  _ Tell him you just cannot handle a date right now.

 

**METHOD THREE: “** **_I understand you. I know it hurts. I know you’re in pain.”_ **

 

_ Step One: “ _ And I fully support the #metoo and #time’s up movements, they’re fantastic.”*

  * *“Times really are changing.”



 

_ Step Two:  _ “But I’ve worked with her a lot, and she really just truly thinks you’re an amazing person.”

 

_ Step Three: “ _ She really loves you.”

 

_ Step Four (optional):  _ __ Step off and take the pressure off of the balls of your feet. Nothing is waiting at the bottom of the canyon anymore. Just desert flowers. Just desert flowers. Just desert flowers.

 

 

  
**post-dramatic**

  
  


Then, as if she were my heart, the moon swelled and burst into a thrumming noise. Her sinusoidal silence bloomed against the nothing-sky. Beneath me, the teeming ocean waited to see what I would do. I stood on nothing that I could see, my shoes were untied and even then, I had blisters, sockless, left just a bit uncomfortable. Enough that it was more unsettling like that. The waves licked at me to reach towards their vibrato mother and her star-studs, in turn pulling me deeper against the orange-peel of the Earth. My body's impact only dimpled it and made it grin an abyss of a smile.

*

When we left the prison, the moon followed to escape the fire that yawned in my wake. The moon didn't disapprove, but it burnt its tendrils. It was quiet now. The yelping red foxes from the prison burned up in the fire, crisp like sun dried tomatoes. They did not yelp as they simmered into sticks and stones. I remembered as the silence sponged the noise of the flames that even when I was silenced, my fingertips could pinch into pinpricks the beady eyes of the foxes that bit my ankles.

*

Ocean. I had jumped into him to escape him. He embraced me and pulled me deeper, leaving me confused and pushing at his throes. But the harder I thrashed, the more I swam. And the more I swam, the deeper I was suctioned against the coral that already pinched my thighs and my breasts. It preferred the thin skin, always. Easier to snip away. To reach the red.

*

The smoke lifts. Only the eyes of the foxes remain. They are even smaller, shrunken and leathery, and I kick them away as if they were beetles between my toes. The moon's gone, so the sun applauds the ashes with bright eyes. He could burn it all up again. I tell him to wait and stay still as I kneel and heave a sob. My tearducts burn. In the Year of the Dog, I burn him down.

*

Furious crashing. Every little tiny person on the shore is throwing glitter and moving against one another in skimpy dress, and I am sitting in the wreckage of a ship that never sank, waiting for my mother to scoop me out and kiss the grime away. Maybe, in some world, she can tweeze out the bits of coral shrapnel sucking my thighs and burn them herself. But she isn't here yet. So I laugh, and I stand on the waves. I laugh at them, at the audacity that they have to pretend they can keep me down. They heckle back, because they know I am wrong. They know I am telling myself things again. 

*

If you must hold something, hold your mother. She aches to patch up your wimp-skin and she burns to rip the leeches from your veins. She blows into your capillaries with every press of her lips on your temple and balloons your heart straight into the same noise the moon became when this all began. If you think there is no reason for this, you are a fool. Dedicate the flames to her, for once. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**cleaver**

 

his eyes, undone, drunk like wine and the gravelly thrum of a rite whimpered on bated breath. when the angel closes his eyes, this is all he has. in this lack of light, his hell, the wine tips and frees itself, slithering, snakes. to the angel, he always resembled truth. the ultimate, underlying, heart-beating, skin-shimmering good that motivates the blind and crawls on jesus-kissed knuckles. the darkness lifts and a lilting voice croons at the angel, a head, a lady-like lizard, and he cannot look her in the eye. his truth, in the light, torn to bits, left as viscera, finch bones, tears. the angel knows he has lied. he will fall to his knees, bitten, damned, quiet, and cry for his truth.

  
  


 

 

**semi-human**

 

now let it be known that the brightest ones fade into hell without smiles on their faces, that their sugary teeth cease to shimmer the second they touch the devil’s wrists, that the demons pry their bursting hearts right out to plop in their mouths like grapes. jaws locked wide open, creatures almost become flowers, swallowing whole, choking on the sweetness.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**5:24 am**

 

In the end, when the wind blew, did the thoughts on the tip of your tongue tell you that it was me? Did you figure out that this all was meant to fall upon you like a typhoon? I think it must have dawned on you, once we passed through another spring and I had once again neglected to breathe for you. I can infer based on the tire tracks in the medians lately, based on the tremble in your step and the way the air stands like pondwater. You might like to know I keep my room exactly one degree cooler now, but I use one less blanket than I did before. 

 

All your pictures are gone, but the painting you did for me sits like a toad on my windowsill. I can’t break the ornament you bought for me. But I feel no conflict at the thought of you. 

 

You are just there. I am just here.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**now, now**

 

I couldn't feel my skin. I couldn't feel real, so I took the highway on foot, took off my Chacos, walked right over the rumble strips and lamented the absence of the noise. I ventured into the median when it became forestry, and cooed at the ants that bit me on the way to the middle. But I stopped being able to see the light through the trees there. It just got thicker and thicker, until I couldn't see my surroundings. I sat down and opened my pizza, only to let it slide onto the ground next to me. Somehow I decided here was where I would die. My skin started to flake off, but I didn't grab at it. The man from Domino's parted the trees like curtains, allowing dusky light to pour in, and stepped in my direction with concern on his face. He asked if he could have the other half. My skinned fingers shakily picked up the dirt-covered pizza and offered it to him, palms facing what I could only assume was the sky. He shook his head and allowed the trees to close again, plunging us into darkness, shoving away the pizza to take my hands. He didn't sit, but he dragged me up into the canopy of the trees, pasting the leaves to my body. As he renewed me, he cried. I closed my eyes and awoke to find myself genuflecting on my own doorstep, skin green and warm. My Chacos were gone, Dominos forgotten. The doormat scratching against my skin was perfectly vivid.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**ode to the self that drowned in my coworker's pool**

 

i was scared to call your name, so in the silence, i'll wait to hear you call mine. i'll wait to see you behind me when i stare at myself in the mirror, wait to see you put your hand on my shoulder. to feel a wave crash on some foreign shore and feel the darkness, the deepness, feel you in it, smell the tuscan sun that was on your skin. in my heart, home will remain with you, as years climb me like bramble and as my head gets heavier. it's almost cruel, how the sky begs me to look up at it, see the very thing that keeps my heart in tow. 

 

i'll keep in mind the sweetness we had when you were here. taking my father's cooper down the coast, catching the salt on the air as i drove with one hand on the wheel. your face when you whiffed a glass of wine, with all the class i hated and adored so much.  i'll hold in my hands the blood that rushed to your cheeks when our eyes met in the rearview mirror, the crack in your voice when you admitted to me you were scared of everything that was on the line. 

 

you were scared of how little time we might have had. i liked to tell you you were wrong. i hated it when you were right. 

 

i was scared you wouldn't answer, so eventually, when i called out for you in my sleep, i pretended you did. 

 

meet me in the summer breeze. meet me in a distant kiss. meet me in the crash of a wave.

 

meet me and make me new.

  
  
  
  
  


**wave**

 

when i dream, we are crowding in a metro station, shoulders bumping one another like flint. there are noises from the arcade in the distance that make my father tear up, something from a time when this age was a sentimental thing. when i wake, we bury ourselves in controversy, running through malls on beat converse soles, filling our parents’ cars with kisses and the smell of cigarettes. if you think we’re foolish now, you should see us in the lot of a dead mall, laying in faded parking spaces and kissing one another under a seedy night sky. we’ll tell our other friends later that there was blood, maybe even claim that someone hooked up with someone else. we won’t tell them of the heartburn and adrenaline just from eye contact, the spark right before the lip is bitten that fizzles too quick.

 

we don’t like to talk about the speedy heartbeats when they actually happen. we prefer to fabricate trauma and burrow in it like sand, pandering to the ceilings in our counselors’ offices with tears on our cheeks. it’s fun, reinventing ourselves every now and then for the rush of blood, for the quirked eyebrows of someone older.

 

when i dream, we are crowding in a metro station, shoulders bumping one another like flint. in the dream, it doesn’t matter. no sparks growl between us. just the steady thrum of our heartbeats.  _ thu-dump. thu-dump. thu-dump. _

 

i will keep dreaming.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**34952**

 

You kept me between the tides, where you wanted me to be. You kept me with your black coffee, your hat, that hard smile that I thought was the only one for miles. I was, purposefully, far away from that boy in your head, the one that sang to you and bought you earrings, the one that saw a different smile. You took me to the beach, led me only to the edge of the water, fingertips pointed upwards beneath my proned palm; it was like you were scared to really touch, all the scientific delicacy in your hands practiced solely on me for that moment. We’d been together for months, but you waded knee-deep into the water alone, and said nothing.

 

I stood with sand between my toes, and you kept me somewhere new, but far still from the you that didn’t care about drenching his expensive white slacks in saltwater, and farther even from the you that cried into the Gulf with callused hands on his heart. 

  
  
  
  
  


**therefore, you and me**

 

when i’m in the dark

and there’s no more stars

left to find

when the last light fizzles

the last bubble of oxygen

rising in my throat

births a million thorns

flowers i never picked

roses that wilt

parts of me the earliest killed

you make me want to breathe

but the last heave in my chest

is long gone

washed into the gulf

if i could say i’m sorry

i’d crash into the moon for a way

for time not to run out

to know if i was right

to know if you got home that night

to know how many dawns

you saw after that

  
  
  
  
  


**corpus**

 

this is the story of my jesus-kissed knees drug across desert sand. canyon fires and a modern goddess draped in pink, the color of her lips. our holy mother of the midnight, a gospel choir on the san diego beaches. and your glimmering teeth, the grin that grabbed me by the fingers and pulled me to stand, placed the balls of my feet in the stirrups, faced me forward for good. you talked about a shining path that we were to follow, that detour that you were already taking, the true man’s world. somewhere and sometime a year away, i’ll say goodbye to the port of new york and look ahead to a neapolitan shore, sand sprinkled in my eyes, your spurs in my hands. 

 

this is the story of how i grew a new soul, was loved again. of how hoofprints kissed with silver drug the continent together over a steady four months, and the divinity of natural beauty blessed us to cross every river unharmed. you would not allow women in your saddle because you rode alongside your  _ goddess of victory _ , and she would remain unparalleled. there’s a song on the rocky mountain wind that lifts us to our feet again.

 

this is the story of how you learned to walk your own way, how you taught me italian curses by the fireside, and brushed your knuckles across my wounds just gingerly enough to show that despite your haste, i was the first and final stop on your blinding star-crossed journey. everything is clear in the reflection, your final lesson. you would make it home. the shortest route was the detour, and we were able to take it all because of you. 

 

this is the story of soft nickers by a pair of dusty horses, of the dent that you left in the sand on the philadelphia coastline the morning that i said goodbye to you.

  
  
  
  
  


**2084**

 

somewhere a stone’s throw away, she leans against a primrose ‘67 mustang, sneakers wet from the hose. everything’s clear in the rearview mirror, the sky is gold and the clouds are huddling around twenty-thirteen and the smoke signals sent up from an abandoned churt pit. a girl with ratty blonde hair and a neon green t-shirt leans out of the window, chipped black nails on vinyl siding, some hoofbeats. summer days are getting cooler and the sun is hers. six years later, she stares into a camera lens and wonders if her lips look chapped, teeth look yellow, hair looks chalky. with the click and the shutter, she sheds her downy coat and soggy converse. the laces had turned brown anyways.

  
  
  
  
  


**your eyes are shut**

 

i hope soon you realize that it hurts, because i did long ago. i hope that when the party’s over, and your pedal foot is leaden, you tell the night sky that you’re in love with me. so many little fish with the dullest teeth have come to me in dark water, brushing my legs, daring to gnaw. your teeth were sharper, bloody, and when i cupped you in my hands you almost seemed to say my name. 

 

i was made for shuffling cards at an empty dining table while my family slept, for mourning my daytime hours, for burying friends. you’re prone to losing, but you’ve never learned. i’ll call you when i come to the point of seeing you over my shoulder in mirrors, when i’m lain in bed and open my eyes to see you watching me sleep, and when i stop caring that you can hear every breath i take.

 

i came to you when the party was over, skin beneath my fingernails, and you held my head while i shook. nothing could stop you then, some fire in your eyes that even i had seen, and when you scolded me for driving in that state i didn’t hear you. i thought maybe you didn’t say anything, the static of a friend’s living room hanging over us in my assumed silence, and i begged you for it. i begged you to let me let you go. 

 

thirty-odd miles away, my parents slept, door locked, lights out and i felt like i hadn’t seen them in years and i wanted to pay a visit. you shushed me and held my hand like you did when we swam in honey together, listening to music that was new back then, but i didn’t want to swim. my arms and legs were tired, feet shaking, toes curled from the cold. it was only october but my nerves were already frayed.

  
  
  
  


**angels on a park bench**

 

there’s a heaven to be had somewhere in your house, whether it be crawling up the chimney or deep in a barrel of bright red wine - the heaven i speak of is the one i came for with outstretched fingers, finch bones all rearranged to spell out your name, knuckles purple and black. the litany of a 1970s receiver growling sometime after midnight just where your mother couldn’t hear, the hoofbeats on your breath when you told me how breathtaking my voice was. the little hellions in your head are falling down the bleachers, their skinny little torsos wracked with painful laughter, and i’m not going to catch them when they reach the final step. i’m not going to mend their concussions when you call on me to do so. i know just how to feel, i know love exists, and i know it doesn’t sleep in the corners of my room. i can grope around with my callused fingers and get cobwebs under my warped nails, but the spiders will be long gone, the soles of my feet will be black, and nobody will be here. the loneliest town is found cradled in my hands at 3 am, doors wide open, lights all off. sometime in the midnight i’ll call out for a renaissance of sorts, a liminal space where parting words will find purchase, a coastline where the waves only lull rather than crash. 

  
  
  
  


**1987 (not of this lifetime)**

 

i wholeheartedly believe that the eighties were our time. in the desert, drowned in the sun, you held my head and the heat frightened me. it wasn't a blood rush or a heartbeat that did it so much as the pads of your fingers, the feeling that i'd been there before. that i'd find myself there again. the thrum of a different world gets lost on you, and there i can find something that i once was. i'll unearth that past self, lick honey off of your fingers, sit on the beach and let the sand fall through the cracks between my fingers. for you, i think that i would let the ocean swallow me, lick at the places i've bled from. i can watch you from afar, wading into the water with blue-steel eyes, and trust you will come back. thumbing at love sonnets and mouthing at roses was never my style. but i can call on a different time, or sit sprawled against you on an unfamiliar balcony, and feel a home of some kind, lingering in the air. i can tell you, with pruned fingers, salty hair, sleep-deprived eyes, that i will miss you when i'm gone. i can tell you, with bloody fingers, busted joints, unwashed hair, that i would take on any cold ocean in the world just to know your heartbeat might flutter. and i can tell you, with a los angeles smile, hair pulled up, bruised feet, that i will still be there when you wake up in the morning.

  
  


 

 

**narcolepsy**

 

tonight i'll tell a story about the new moon, the something through my sunroof that takes me home, the storm that sits on the skyline and waits for the bottom to fall out. when i tell you, you'll listen, with a waxy gaze and twitching fingers, trying to close your eyes like there is something important etched on the backs of your eyelids. sometimes what hurts the most is what stings the least to recall, and it's always the thing that you shove in your glovebox before a long shift. it's what plays on your face in the split second before a stranger asks you if everything's been well with you. it's the lack of a pointed meaning to assign to your lackadaisical rambling, the grin on your lips as you finally fade away pressed against my side. the eventual morning that i finally wake up searching for someone rather than whoever - that's when my story will be well and done. that's when you can doze off into a luxury that i can't afford. the wildness that i've nurtured is fading out like a flame, and the more i fan it the fainter it grows. a summary, a story, none of it would capture the crick in my neck after sleeping in my car for two nights straight, how high i was when i drove home from that halloween party, the sheer number of strangers who've seen their names tattooed on the inside of my lower lip, or even the pricks in my temples when i try to justify my years. nobody can tell me why i stayed, what i felt when i was growing tired from treading the strange waters. i want to know. i'll grope my way through the maze eventually, have enough conversations with myself, and then i think i will be able to erode it all. this is a story that bores because it's often told, and it does not hold up well between teeth. yes, when i settle in to bed at another late hour and think about what i would have done with my family that day, you can stop listening.

  
  
  
  
  


**and in the wreckage -**

 

  1. in the year of the goat, i wake up one morning with lead ankles, curled deep in sobs and blankets. i rise without my sterling silver, into withering flora, jungle smoke. i love you like a burden, the gurgle in your throat after destroying a bottle of cinnamon whiskey. this is a laundry list of what you gave me for christmas that year: the simmer of a stick of incense burnt down to just the butt, pads on my feet worn black walking in your yard when it's too cold for these shorts, makeshift ouija boards and the cap off a bottle of mexican coke for the planchette. eyes in the underbrush and i know, in my own den, i won't wander drunk into an unfamiliar kitchen, won't cry into the opened door of the fridge with hands on my back.
  2. you lead me to the bathroom and kiss my knuckles before i punch them bloody on the painted bricks, all snake teeth and cloven hooves. i don't know yet that in three years, i'll show you my blood in a pretty picture frame, under a new name, and demand you pay the damages -- but i let you laugh into our kisses, eyes wide open. so many little glittery fish have bitten me by now, with the dullest teeth, the pettiest grievances that i'll laugh at, but you starved me, and a new boy will sit in his bed with no sleep at the sunrise and he will scrawl pages and pages of pain for you. all of the research i have done on the wreckage, all of the charts and figures can't paint an unconventional picture of how we devoured ourselves.
  3. you can cry where i can see, but your cheeks will stay dry and nobody will ever want to hear about any of it. a train derailed is no concern to the people left un-concussed, intact and warm in their linens miles away, but the reality is that everyone has been here. everyone has taken a dip in this stagnant water and been bitten by the mosquitoes. but what is left, the cracks in the sky, the peeling nail polish,  is a second skin that doesn't always suction perfectly to its hosts, shows itself in different dastardly displays of puppetry, 50-cent picture shows on popular streetways. you will pass through every season the same as the next soul, but the leaves will always fall in different patches, and houses destroyed by the typhoons will see their properties usurped by new construction.
  4. i will conclude, when i fall into my final autumn, that nothing was ever as bad as it seemed. but i still crumble in the corners of crowded rooms, laughing at the cyclical nature of it all, watching you through my mirror and hating everything you love. the high heels i wear in my senior pictures, my mother's paranoid eyes, my sixteenth birthday. i cannot write anymore about how much it hurts, because it really doesn't. it's not all pain. it's the confusion that comes when a polluted nostalgia ends up making me miss it, the crow's feet in the corners of my eyes when i remember how you made my ribs hurt with the hilarity of what we could be, the years i gained with the words left on our tongues minutes after the wreck.
  5. this is a laundry list of what i am left trying to prevent from spilling through my fingers: punching you in the jaw so hard i heard it crack, keeping the nights awake with fake memories, icicle lights through the den windows as grungy music crackles through the receiver. the hardness and maturity that comes with finally telling myself the sweet parts still ferment in some corner of my head, next to some cowering fifteen-year-old with a tiny voice, crying for some alchemy to set it right. i will plant myself with a new name, new chemistry. desert flowers will bloom. i have eroded enough to the point of forgetting your voice, and these vestigial volumes of history will turn to dust. maybe you will finally dissolve.



 


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